Response to Ira F. Stone, Reading Talmud/Reading Levinas

Aryeh Cohen
University of Judaism

Reading Talmud/Reading Levinas is immediately compelling as an argument
against the regnant opinion that what average synagogue goers and adult
education consumers want is predigested, basic Judaism. Ira Stone has
had the audacity to propose studying not only Talmud but Talmud through
a Levinasian lens with a non-specialist audience. He has opened up the
gates and welcomed the barbarians in.

In doing this he has, I think, made an argument for textual reasoning on
a popular level. The argument goes something like this: the central
issues of our time--the central ethical, theological, philosophical
issues of our time--are accessible for reflection through the medium of
Talmud. It is not necessarily that the questions are new, but the way of
talking about them is. And, therefore, we might not have to be satisfied
with the aporias of the traditional Western philosophical, theological
and ethical ways that you [you disaffected Jewish intellectual, or
intelligent Jewish non-intellectual] have been thinking about these
issues. We will read these ancient texts together and, once you have
gotten used to the oddness of style and language, you will come to see
that you feel at home in these texts too. There is a way to ask your
questions here.

There are two points in Ira Stone's process, or method, or teaching at
which I would like to tarry. One is the point at which he calls on
imagination:

The third reading involves an act of interpretation, when we freeze and
study all our accumulated moments of imagination. (46)

The second is not so much a point, but rather that which, in a sense,
Stone claims as an underlying principle of Levinas' and his whole
enterprise: translation.

His enterprise is, then, as I have contended, an act of double
translation.

(21)

I start with the latter.

Stone's deployment of "translation" is similar to Rosenzweig's concept
of translation as a redemptive act. For Rosenzweig, the translation of
the Bible by all peoples in all languages is "the coming of 'that Day'."
The translation of the Bible--more than any other piece of
literature--heralds the coming together of the world's different
languages since each language is then influenced by the language of the
Bible.

Levinas, similarly, "wants to bring to the non-Jewish reader a new
discourse in which totality is broken, in which reason is not abandoned
but is founded on what is prior to reason--namely ethics." (21) This
would be what Rosenzweig might refer to as Biblicizing the non-Jewish
discourse, or perhaps "Judaicizing Greek" to use Levinas' term. At the
same time, Levinas is worried about Jews coming to the study hall and
finding merely bread and salt (to borrow Heschel's image). "He claims
that he wants to bring to Jewish readers a new/old way of reading Talmud
through which Jews can discover a meaning in Jewish particularity, so
that they can fill in the lacunae left by Western universalism." (21)

For Levinas then, it would seem, the redemptive translation is the
translation of Talmud rather than Bible. And, too, the translation is
into Greek, that is, Western philosophy, the language that claims, and
is sometimes granted, intellectual primacy. It is not the transformation
of specific languages that returns us to a pre-Babel state of
communicative transparency ("ideal communicative situations"), but
rather the transformation of the mode of thought, as it were.

Translating from Talmud into Greek is an act by which "totality is
broken." It is an act which ultimately will undermine the possibility of
totalitarianism and, in its wake, genocide. At the same time, Levinas is
fighting assimilation. He is desperate to show the relevance
(philosophical, intellectual) of the Talmud. As Stone says at one point:
"Indeed, the philosophical or theological issues masked by the formal
discussion of legal minutiae represent the unstated but unmistakable
purpose of the text." (76) It needs to be obvious that the Talmud is
about something important such as philosphy, rather than the quotidian
law that it appears to be discussing.

It seems to me that there is an inherent tension between these two
purposes. On the one hand, there is a clearly altruistic or lishma (even
soteriological) reason for the translation: translating Talmud into
Greek impacts Greek, and utlimately Talmudicizes Greek, bringing on
"That Day" when there will be no more totalitarianism, etc. On that day
when the whole world thinks Talmud, which defers totality and opts for
infinity, then the world will be as one: albeit a one which might be a
blending or harmony of particularities. On the other hand, it seems that
Levinas is walking out into the marketplace of ideas and is noticing
that no Jew (or no Jewish intellectual) is buying Talmud. Moreover, it
seems, Jews are not buying Judaism . So Levinas is also writing "An
apology for a despised religion." This polemical/apologetic side of the
Levinasian project casts the translation itself into a different
light. It is not the Talmudicizing of Greek that occurs through
apologetics, but the Hellenizing of Talmud. The point is to show the
wayward Jewish intellectual that all he seeks in terms of intellectual
and spiritual fulfillment is already here in our own backyard, and there
is no reason to graze in foreign fields. Here the translation is not
merely an interpretation but a brief for Judaism.

There are problems on both sides of this translative spectrum. In
translating from Talmud to Greek, one must seriously ask the question:
Can everything that can be said in Talmud, be said in Greek? What is
being lost in the translation? In translating in the opposite direction
one must ask: What is it that is not being translated? And why? What
kind of textual reasoning, then, is translation? What kind of textual
reasoning is Stone engaged in here?

It is at this point that we engage the significant moment in Stone's
method, the third reading "when we freeze and study all our accumulated
moments of imagination." The underlying assumption is that the
interpretive or exegetical process, the process of study that ultimately
rereads the Talmudic text into our concerns, is an aesthetic process.
Stone quotes the following passage from Levinas' Beyond the Verse as a
basis for his method:

Something would remain unrevealed in the Revelation if a single soul in
its singularity were to be missing from the exegesis. That this process
of renewal may be taken as alterations of the text is not ignored by the
Talmudic scholars. (BTV, 171)

This passage seems very close in its concerns to Rabbi Abraham Isaac
Kook's contention in Orot Hakodesh that the redemptive moment will not
come until every brush stroke that might be drawn--is.

The textual reasoning exhibited here is reasoning in response to, or
perhaps in resonance with, the text. The very close, almost
deconstructive, first reading, and the interrogatory second reading
initiate a set of vibrations which set off harmonic responses in the
various and varied readers. The responses are, of course, conditioned by
the specific tone and timbre of each reader/reasoner. Ultimately,
though, all responses need to be made explicit for the redemptive goal.
As the conductor/composer/facilitator of this specific composition it is
Ira Stone who serves as a filter. This is the "freezing and studying"
mentioned above. The various and varied harmonics might be dampened as
soon as plucked if they cannot be contained in this reading. They might
though, theoretically, be engaged later, in another reading by this or
another reader/reasoner. To engage the book on its substance, therefore,
is to engage the choices. To resurrect some of the paths not chosen, or
the echoes dampened. To this end I would like to spend a bit of time
with the chapter on translation (Chapter Three). The first choice that
is made is how to understand the fact that the gemara is dealing with
the problem of translating the names for various legal documents. Stone
takes the following path:

The gemara takes for granted that the word of God, as we human beings
can experience it, is found in texts. The gemara is acutely aware that
the perception of God's word and God's will leads through a labyrinth of
texts each of which requires explanation. Our sugya tackles this problem
head on. (59)

Since we are dealing with divine writ, Stone seems to be saying, when
the Talmud talks of translation it must be talking of translating the
word of God--and not a mere legal document. The document mentioned in
the sugya as the object of concern of the gemara, is almost a parable
for the real object of concern--divining God's will. No room is left for
the documents to stand by themselves without being implicated in the
metaphysics--in our religious concerns.

The next move flows naturally from this first stance (which is almost a
basic axiom of Stone's throughout the book). The fact that the gemara
does not comment (remains silent) on the line in the mishnah: "...it
should remain with him until Elijah comes," speaks loudly for Stone.
"This line in the mishnah challenges the very enterprise on which the
gemara is founded. That is, it challenges the premise that we (i.e.
people) can understand the word of God by the ability to interpret
texts." (67)

Finally, the sugya ends with the notion that a contract might be
validated by a third party. Stone interrogates this notion on the level
of the deeper philosophical discussion, by asking who the third party
might be to The Contract.

"If the Torah is the agreement binding Israel to God, then the final
arbiter of the effectiveness of that agreement is not the Jewish people
itself, but all of humanity. Therefore, the other in our sugya is just
that: those who are not party to the original agreement. Jewish
society--that is, Torah--is judged by the righteousness of those who are
not Jewish. The validation of the torah is in the hands of those who
will judge whether the life of the Torah's devotee bespeaks a divine
text." (70)

The interpretive move that Stone is making in this chapter is the mirror
image of the move that the midrash makes when interpreting Deut. 30.
There the midrash (Sifre Deuteronomy and others) puts the story into the
terms of a trial with witnesses and Moshe as rhetor. Stone is making the
opposite move here: the discussion of a legal issue is "actually" a
discussion of the self-same theological issue of Deut. 30--the
validation of the legally binding agreement between God and Israel.
There is precedent for this type of move--all the details of marriage
and divorce law: ketubah, kiddushin, get are used to represent and
discuss the relationship between God and Israel. There is also great
precedent for the opposite move. One piquant example is that in
Kiddushin 29b, the obligation of redeeming one's first born son is
giving greater "legitimacy" (that is, legal power and efficacy in
competition with other legal claims) by being couched in the language of
"prior lien"--that is, the Kohen might collect from encumbered land
since the obligation of one's own redemption as a first born pre-dates
any encumbrance, as it occurs simultaneously with birth. This is
counter-intuitive to a modern or contemporary discourse in which the
claims of religion or God are segregated from the claims of torts and
courts--the Jewish community today operates under an expanded
understanding of dina demalkhuta dina [the law of the government is
binding]. For this reason even Halakhically observant Jews go to civil
courts to work out damages and compensations and the like--rarely
invoking Yoreh Deah.

What gets lost in Stone's translation is the law itself. In a rather
more sophisticated way, Stone reinscribes the notion that the spirit is
more important than the letter. The larger philosphical discussion is
important rather than the "surface legal discussion." In moving quickly
to the philosophical we might, however, have missed the opportunity to
turn the theological discussion back on to the legal discussion.
Ultimately, are not contracts and torts and loans (perhaps, for the
Talmud, especially loans)interactions with the other? The surface legal
discussion itself bespeaks the face of the other. How is the ethical
call to righteousness that recurs throughout the book, imbricated in the
legal system?

It is this that, to my mind, is the weakness of the book. Again in the
chapter on prayer Stone says: "Rabbi Hanina says: 'in the time of
finding' refers to [the finding of] a wife. For it is said: Whoever
finds a wife finds a great good. It is of course inconceivable that
Rabbi Hanina believes that prayer should be restricted to men looking
for wives. His statement and the text that includes it are not intended
to be read literally. Rather, his statement must be understood
theologically. What legitimate need and what justification for prayer
can we extrapolate from Rabbi Hanina's example? I would suggest that
Rabbi Hanina's view refers to the blessings of material happiness.
According to Rabbi Hanina, issues of family, work, health, and wealth
are alll acceptable subjects of prayer." (emphasis added)(53)

But what of the literal reading? And what of the relationship of the men
and women, when a man is understood as finding great good or great
misfortune in a spouse--the Talmudic equivalent of the whore-madonna
complex. It is understood, from the ethical position that Stone
occupies, why it would be inconceivable that the Rabbis would be praying
for wives or dividing them into great and awful. But they were. That too
is a voice that needs to be heard and subjected to the explicit critique
that Stone would subject it too. Only then would nothing "remain
unrevealed in the Revelation."

Ultimately, though this stance is also a strength. Ira Stone has made a
compelling and sophisticated argument for hearing the word of God in
Talmud. While this is a challenge for those (such as myself) who would
see Talmud as being written in the space which is the absence of God,
the exile of God, this challenge is welcome and productive. Moreover,
Stone challenges those of us wandering or working in the academic
marketplace to lay our own explicit claims on Talmud. What is it that we
are doing when we study and teach? This question is at the heart of the
project of textual reasoning,and this book lays out one powerful answer
to it.

Back to Textual Reasoning vol. 8, table of contents